Was the Most Mysterious Job in Politics — Until Now

The inner workings of politics have ceased to be inner in 2016.
Social media and 24-hour cable news networks feed us more details on
political campaigns than we ever knew we wanted. Via documentaries like The War Room and The Circus and fictional albeit realistic-enough TV shows including House of card and Veep,
voters might think we know every behind-the-scenes secret about Capitol
Hill. But one political profession remains shrouded in relative
mystery: the "advance" team.

"The existence of this world has only been passed down through clans and cliques."

Advance
people specialize in the art of stagecraft that governs every public
appearance, photo op, and televised moment in politics — often referred
to as "the optics" of events. "Advance men" (as they were called in the
early days, when they were pretty much all men) are the protectors of a
candidate's image. They travel ahead of every public appearance, set the
stage for the most memorable photos with the perfect lighting and
backdrops, and do their best to anticipate and prevent any potential
issues. They also ensure that candidates and politicians live within a
carefully curated bubble, that they never arrive anywhere that isn't
perfectly prepped.
In the book Off
Script: An Advance Man's Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle,
and Political Suicide
advance man Josh King tells the modern history of political
orchestration, from 1988 to the present. The former director of
production for presidential events under Bill Clinton, King has
orchestrated countless media moments for candidates and officeholders
throughout the years, and his witty and remarkably bipartisan book
details backstories from a dozen campaigns, both Democrat and
Republican. It's packed with anecdotes from both King's career and those
of his colleagues, both the triumphs and the utter failures.

In a recent interview with POPSUGAR, King put it more playfully:
"What advance people do for candidates is very similar to what roadies
do for traveling shows or what a motion picture director does on a film
set, and that is make sure that something that is designed to entertain
and impress and inform comes off without a hitch." That's right: advance
people are the roadies of politics.

Not surprisingly, the profession tends to attract political junkies
who want to travel the world, which is precisely how King got into it.
After graduating from college, he had the opportunity to take a tour of
the White House — or, as he calls it, "that empty stage set," the
backdrop for every presidency he'd ever known. He asked the man giving
the tour, "What do you do here?" He explained that he was the director
of advance for the first lady: "I travel everywhere the first lady
travels and make sure everything is perfect." At that moment, King
realized, this was the career for him.
To quote the movie Taken, advance people share a
very particular set of skills. "You have to be intellectually curious
about the country and the world around you," King said. "It's combining
that with being a roadie. You have to be passionate about the issues and
policies that you're dealing with but equally creative about how you
present them." The realities of advance work have seeped gently into pop
culture — House of Cards creator Beau Willimon is a
former advance man — but until now, "the existence of this world has
only been passed down through clans and cliques," King said.
King got his start working for the Democratic presidential campaign
of late US Senator Paul Simon and then joined the Dukakis/Bentsen
campaign after Simon's folded. He was not, however, responsible for "Dukaka and the tank,"
a disastrous photo op that King outlines in the first part of his book,
when Dukakis was photographed in an Abrams tank looking particularly
goofy in a too-large helmet. The event is so infamous that President
Obama referenced it as recently as 2013 when presented with a helmet
during a visit with the Navy: "You don't put stuff on your head if
you're president," Obama said.
Throughout the current presidential election, Donald Trump has
shattered countless precedents including the hat rule. "He's basically
wearing his bumper sticker on his head," King pointed out. "But it's not
about the hat. It was never about the hat. It's about the person
underneath and how authentic they are. Donald Trump is pretty much the
Donald Trump he presents."
With the rise of social media, the role of an advance man is
drastically different from when King started in his career, partly
because the orchestrated moments have less impact than the
unorchestrated ones. Now, the media moments that get traction tend to be
viral and fleeting: think

Hillary Clinton at the subway turnstile

or
Marco Rubio's heeled
ankle boots
.
As King points out in his book, advance people were once left mostly
alone to execute their creative genius, but present-day politicians have
more say in shaping their own images. The world of advance work is
changing so rapidly, King writes, that the paperback edition of Off Script will surely need a new afterword.
Of course, one constant is the ability of a single moment to derail a campaign. Remember
Mitt Romney's vocal
rendering of "America the Beautiful"? Or Rubio's GOP debate gaffe
when he basically repeated the same soundbite four times? That was not
the screwup of an advance man. As the "moments" become harder to
control, today's advance teams are more focused on weaving together a
consistent, overarching narrative.
Of the many reasons to read Off Script — including
King's detailed description of what it's like to ride on Air Force One —
the most satisfying takeaway for politics junkies is feeling like
you're in the know about this clandestine clique. You'll never watch a
debate, a convention, or an episode of Veep the same way again.